Frame Layer Rate Control Method for Stereoscopic Video Coding Based on a Novel Rate-Distortion Model

Rate control plays an important role in video coding and transmission. In this paper, a novel rate-distortion model has first been proposed to characterize the coding characteristics of stereoscopic video coding, where the weighted average of the left and right viewpoint measured with the video quality metric (VQM) is adopted as the stereoscopic video coding distortion metric, instead of Mean Square Error (MSE). Then a frame layer rate control method for stereoscopic video coding has been presented based on the proposed R-D model. Experimental results demonstrate that, the proposed R-D model can accurately characterize the relationship among coding distortion, coding rate and quantization parameter and the proposed rate control method can efficiently control the output bit rate consistent with the target bit rate while the reconstructed video quality is comparable.